


Stellar Ignition

by lastSaskatchewanPirate



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Canon What Canon, Dream Sharing, Dubious Science, Eventual Happy Ending, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Mutual Pining, blatant misuse of quantum mechanics, continuity soup, evenutal fluff, it's only temporary, totally self-indulgent schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-04 11:27:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11554242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastSaskatchewanPirate/pseuds/lastSaskatchewanPirate
Summary: Sometimes destruction is a necessary precursor to creation.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a post I made on Tumblr a while back, about a shmoopy fairy tale I was telling myself while trying to fall asleep that was then hijacked by Science.
> 
> This is the fairy tale. The science part will come in eventually.

_There was no pain._

_There was no grief._

_There was no past and no future, only this infinite moment._

_There was no up or down, no cold, no heat. There was no light and no darkness._

_There was no space and no time. There was only peace. The anguish and regret and despair that had haunted him for millions of years were at last silent._

_He would have stayed in that moment forever, if he could._

*

Orion roused himself slowly, processor sluggish from deep recharge, phantom memories of … of silence, of stillness, of peace, fading like mist before the sun as he swung his legs over the edge of the berth and sat up.

He tried to cling to those phantom memories as he moved through the shuttle from berth to cockpit, but they were fleeting, ephemeral; the harder he tried, the faster they fell apart, until he gave it up with a weary sigh and focused on the work at hand. There would be time for contemplation later, perhaps.

*

Megatron was up and moving as soon as his internal chronometer signaled that his on-shift was shortly to begin. It would have taken a much closer observer than any of his current companions – closer and with much longer familiarity – to notice that his attention was not fully engaged in his actions; that his processor was still caught ever so slightly by fading memories (memories of silence, of stillness, of safety and … and peace) from his off-shift recharge cycle.

Megatron mentally shook himself free of those lingering impressions and brought his focus to bear fully on his current tasks. There was no time for foolishness; there never had been, and that fact, at least, had remained the same despite all the other changes in his life.

* 

_There was no pain._

_There was no sorrow, no grief, no regret over a past that here, in this moment, did not exist; no fear or despair for a future that could not touch him._

_There was silence, and safety, and peace._

_And then, slowly, there was a sense of … emptiness. Of something missing._

*

The time and space between the stars ceased to matter when your voyage had no actual purpose, no goal, no sense of urgency. Orion tried to remember if this particular journey had ever had those things, and could not.

Interstellar space offered no answers, only the chance to finally ask questions of himself.

*

Quantum engines were all well and good when they were actually working; but without an actual heading, they were effectively flying blind through the vastness of the universe in search of something that might not even exist.

Megatron refused to allow himself to think about the futility of this so-called quest. It might have looked, at first glance, like an opportunity to stave off execution while giving himself time and space to reconnoiter, but that didn’t mean he was actually sanguine about spending the rest of his existence wandering aimlessly through the cosmos. Not with this crew, at least.

He shrugged off the specters of isolation and loneliness and headed for the bridge. He had work to do.

Surely, on a ship this size, there was work he could do.

* 

_There was no pain._

_There was no grief._

_There was no despair._

_There was no time or space, no urgency, no regret. There was silence, and stillness, and peace._

_And … there was loneliness._

_There were no names here and no memories, but still his spark reached out, yearning for something it could not identify and could never forget._

*

Orion woke himself by reaching out for something … something important?

Something missing.

*

Megatron woke to find himself standing by the door of his hab, the sense of something missing still lingering in his processor.

He refused to think about what it might be.

*

_There was no pain._

_There was no grief._

_There was … there was …_

_There was an absence._

_There was no time and no space here in this infinite moment, and yet he found himself reaching for something._

_For someone._

_He found himself calling, and waiting for a response._

* 

Orion paced, as much as he could in a shuttle this size. He needed to recharge, but found himself reluctant to do so, as if he had been having bad dreams that he could not remember.

He was beginning to wonder if he was lonely.

*

Megatron pushed himself to avoid recharge for as long as possible, until he knew that continuing to do so would leave him unfit for command; until he knew that the medical staff was eyeing him speculatively; until he could see Rodimus hovering, waiting to see him frag up.

He retreated to his berth with his dignity intact, and carefully did not think on why he did not want to recharge.

*

_There was no time or space here, and yet there was movement._

_There was no up or down, no heat or cold, no past or future; and yet something had changed._

_He was no longer alone. There, on the farthest edges of perception, on the distant rim of cognition, there was a sense of someone else._

_Someone reaching back._

_Someone answering._

*

Orion closed the subspace comm link, and sat back in the pilot’s seat. He had coordinates, a time and a place.

The _Lost Light_ was waiting.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It can be surprisingly difficult to arrange for a private conversation in deep space.

Alone in the darkness of interstellar space, this had seemed like a brilliant idea – that they would meet again, face-to-face; that all the rivalry and betrayal and pain could finally be addressed and redressed and exorcized; that they could find resolution and peace …

Reality was turning out to be considerably more awkward.

The _Lost Light_ command staff were plainly at a loss once standard boarding and greeting protocols had been executed, and while the sight of Ultra Magnus actually fidgeting in outright discomfort might, under other circumstances, have provided some much-needed levity, Orion found that his own discomfort outweighed any such amusement by too great a margin.

Unsurprisingly, it was Rodimus who broke the silence.

“Wow, okay, this is incredibly awkward.” He slapped his hands together, looked around, and then nodded to the rest of his crew. “I don’t know about you guys, but I think I’m going to go find a reason to be somewhere else. Like, immediately if not sooner. I’ll, um, come find you later, Op … uh. Orion.” A quick about-face and he was halfway out the door before anyone could think to object.

Rodimus’s departure, spectacularly undiplomatic as it was, nevertheless freed up the rest of his command crew from their collective cerebral vapor lock and they made a hasty departure in his wake, leaving behind only Megatron to continue the awkwardness.

Mercifully, in spite of all else that had changed, Megatron still had a complete lack of patience for pointless dithering and refused to continue said awkwardness for one more femtosecond.

“I assume there’s a reason for your visit.”

Orion tensed at the familiar sound of that deep, harsh voice; but when his battle protocols failed to come online, he dared to allow himself to relax just a little.

“I needed to speak with you.”

“Yes, I had already gathered as much from your initial comm.” There was the barest trace of something that might be amusement in Megatron’s voice. It was at least not outright rejection, and Orion had to wrestle back the immediate impulse to latch onto that with all the hope left to him.

“Perhaps we could find a more … hospitable venue for this conversation?” Orion gestured to the cavernous shuttle bay in which they stood. “Preferably one with a measure of privacy?”

Megatron’s startled bark of laughter contained more than a trace of bitter irony, but it was not completely devoid of actual humor. “I can’t speak for its hospitality, but I can almost certainly guarantee that your shuttle is going to provide us with significantly more privacy than any area on this vessel, hospitable or otherwise.”

Which was how they found themselves in the admittedly cramped but mercifully private cockpit of Orion’s shuttle, setting a course for a nearby nebula that the Lost Light had been skirting. If nothing else was accomplished on this jaunt, they could at least claim to have been scouting it for resources; and the process of navigation and obstacle avoidance provided further distraction from the fact that they were nearly shoulder-to-shoulder without trying to beat the slag out of each other.

Eventually, though, the elephant in the shuttle had to be addressed; it was Megatron who finally turned away from the controls and broached the subject.

“Alright, we have privacy. We have accommodations at least marginally better than a shuttle bay. Why are you here, Orion?”

Genocidal tyrant he might have been, but even his most vocal detractors could never deny that Megatron had the courage – or just sheer bloody-mindedness – to meet any challenge head-on. (Whether or not that was the best course of action was an entirely separate subject for debate.) And for good or for ill, he had always brought out the same straight-forward determination in Orion Pax – whatever name he happened to be carrying at the time.

Orion looked at him – always a constant point in his cosmos, whether enemy or ally or something yet to be determined – and felt the awkward uncertainty fall away to stillness and silence, felt the fear and distress fade to peace.

“I missed you.”

It was unclear who was more surprised by Orion’s words – Megatron, or Orion himself – but it was true. It was raw, unvarnished, and completely honest, and in the silence that followed that simple declaration Orion found the words he hadn’t known he wanted to say.

“You … you have hurt me, Megatron. You have enraged me like no one else. You drove our people to the brink of extinction, you destroyed planets and populations and everything you touched … and despite all of that, I have missed you. I have thought of you, dreamed of you; I have wondered a thousand times and a thousand thousand more how we came to this point, how we could have changed the course of our war, how we could have done it all differently …” Orion’s voice dropped to a murmur. “I wonder what we could have been, if it had been different.”

“Orion …” Nothing could make Megatron’s voice other than a deep, harsh rasp, but shock at least seemed to be able to strip the menace from it entirely. He had gone completely still, and Orion could not determine whether it was revelation or revulsion in his eyes.

“I dreamed of you,” Orion said, a little desperately now, “over and over I dream of you, and I think I’m not wrong that you’ve dreamed of me, too.”

“No.” Megatron drew a deep, deep breath that absolutely did not shake, that was utterly steady by sole virtue of the iron control exerted on his frame. “No, you’re not wrong.”

Silence gripped them again, each lost in his own thoughts, and Orion found himself for the moment out of words.

Maybe not out of inspiration, though.

There were storage lockers aft of the cockpit. Careful to telegraph his movement so as not to startle Megatron – because, as the universe had had ample reason to learn, a startled Megatron was unpredictable at best and savagely destructive as a matter of course – Orion moved to rummage briefly in the lockers and then return with his spoils: two drinking vessels, and a container of extremely potent high-grade.

Megatron looked dubious. “Orion, you know the terms of my sentence as well as I do.”

“Indeed.” Orion cracked the seal and filled both vessels. “And yet I insist.”

Orion could see the moment that the volatile compounds outgassing from the high-grade hit Megatron’s fuel-starved sensors, and a smirk curved the former warlord’s mouth.

“Well then.” Megatron raised his glass. “If you insist, then who am I to refuse?”

“You are who you always have been,” Orion replied dryly, “a contrary, bad-tempered thug who would spit in the face of the gods just to provoke the fight he’s spoiling for.” He raised his own glass in an offered toast. “To the future.”

“Flattery will only get you so far,” Megatron warned, but there was genuine amusement warming his voice now. “To the future.”

In unison, they drained their glasses. Orion refilled them.

And, alone in the darkness of interstellar space, they began to talk.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Old habits die hard. Luckily, these two idiots are even harder to kill.

It wasn’t easy to talk to each other like this, openly and frankly. It wasn’t easy to keep themselves from falling back on old habits, to talk through the anger instead of just hitting each other, to talk openly without weighing every word for its potential to expose either weakness or strength.

It wasn’t easy to look past four million years of war, but they tried.

It helped that they were alone, with no one to observe or judge or interfere. It also helped that they had gone through enough high-grade to render a battalion paralytic, and currently neither Orion nor Megatron was up for anything more physically coordinated or strenuous than leaning together, shoulder to shoulder, on the shuttle’s narrow berth.

They had talked, and it had – unsurprisingly – turned into shouting, into all-out verbal brawling, into recrimination and rage. But it had also – again, unsurprisingly (to them, at least) – turned at times to laughter, to fond reminiscence, to almost comradely taunting. Megatron had forgotten, for example, that Orion not only had a sense of humor but that said sense of humor could be downright salty, and at the moment they were sufficiently overcharged that even four million years of war was slagging hilarious.

Orion had just finished telling an extremely off-color story about Ironhide, the misuse of a certain piece of medical equipment, and a drunken wager that may or may not have involved Skywarp, and was watching with open amusement and only thinly-veiled affection as Megatron laughed so hard that the only sound coming out was a sort of wheezing click.

Orion sighed happily and collapsed back across the berth like a structurally-compromised construction crane, bumping his head against the wall with a hollow _tonk_ in the process. Megatron, who had almost recovered from his utterly undignified wheezing fit, was set off again, thereby rendering him unusually pliable; and Orion was able to tug Megatron down into a relatively comfortable sprawl beside him.

They lay there in contented silence, systems humming, warm and loose-limbed with charge.

“I wish we could have done this sooner.” Orion’s voice was soft and wistful. “Millennia ago.”

“Mmh,” said Megatron; and then, after a pause, “So do I.”

“So much time behind us.” Orion appeared to be well on the inebriation glide slope from giddy to maudlin. Megatron refused to deal with a maudlin Orion Pax, particularly when he himself was still in the warm-and-happy phase and was enjoying it immensely.

He nudged Orion’s shoulder impatiently. “Plenty of time ahead of us, too.” He turned his head just enough to glare impressively at Orion. “Don’t bury us yet, Orion. We still have time.”

Orion was sleepy-eyed and quiescent, and the look he turned on Megatron could only be described as wistful. “Do we?”

Some part – a very large part – of Megatron wanted to respond with his usual bravado and a bold declaration along the lines of “Of course” and “who could stand in the way of our combined might” and other such blustering sentiments. The rest of him, fortunately, was a little wiser.

“Of course we do,” he replied quietly, turning on his side to lie face-to-face with his oldest and dearest enemy. “We have all the time we need, now.”

A rare, unguarded smile curved Orion’s mouth as his eyes closed, and he turned to face Megatron. “All the time we want.”

*

_There was no pain._

_There was no regret or fear._

_There was no loneliness._

_There was light, and warmth, and peace. There was comfort._

_There was companionship._

_Bodiless, they reached out and found each other. Voiceless, they cried out in unison, drawn together as living flame, as plasma arcs, in delirious joy._

_There was light, and rising charge, and ecstasy._

*

Orion gasped himself awake and for a moment believed himself poised for immolation in a smelter, drowning in heat and blinded by dazzling light. Charge crawled across his frame in glowing arcs of color like a polar aurora, his internal temperature was close to red-line, and everywhere in his vision was bright, blinding light, blue-white and green-white pulsing in perfect synchrony …

Pulsing in perfect time with his spark.

The bafflement began to fade and awareness began to return. The heat, the light, the crackling charge – he and Megatron were entwined with each other on the narrow berth, legs entangled, hands clutching at each other’s shoulders. The air above them rippled with distortion from the heat pouring off their frames. The light was spark-light. Both of their sparks exposed, armor completely retracted, bodies pressed chest-to-chest until their sparks’ coronae overlapped and melded, driving the charge and temperature ever higher.

It was shocking.

It was thrilling.

It was so ecstatically pleasurable as to be bordering on pain, and Orion’s frame and spark and processor ached with the intensity of it.

He forced his eyes to focus on the face barely a hand span from his own, and saw that Megatron was in much the same state. Panting, eyes unfocused, tremors coursing irregularly through him; Megatron forced his own eyes to focus on Orion, and managed to quirk a brief, ironic smile.

“Megatron …?” Orion whispered, and then stifled an undignified whine as pleasure surged hotly through him in time with his spark pulse, from core out to every last peripheral sensor in a sweet, tingling wave.

Megatron huffed a laugh at him. “Close,” he said, and his voice was a low, intimate rumble that buzzed through Orion’s frame and drove another gasp from him. “So close … You?”

“Yes,” Orion breathed. They were poised together on the very brink of overload, frame and spark alike straining toward completion, so close … so _close_ …

Megatron smiled then, an actual smile, and closed his eyes, and tilted his head infinitesimally forward until his mouth was a breath away from Orion’s; and when he spoke, Orion could feel the barest brush of lips on his own. “Together, then?”

“Oh, _yes_.”

They went over together in a blinding flash.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, onboard the Lost Light, there is science.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is where I start throwing in bits and pieces of astrophysics as though I'm making Science Gumbo. It's a little hand-wavy, but it's not actually made up; mostly I'm sort of waving around the interesting bits and leaving out the copious quantities of high-level math.
> 
> ALSO: THIS IS A BIT SAD. MAYBE. SORT OF? FOR NOW? It's a fairy tale, though. Remember that.

Interstellar space was immense.

Like, unimaginably so, even for someone with a potential lifespan on the geological-epoch time scale and possessed of a ship with quantum-jump capabilities.

Like, seriously. Immense.

And _boring_.

Rodimus stifled the urge to sigh, adding that to the increasingly long list of other stifled urges from this particular duty cycle. Fidgeting, pacing, carving on his desk, and prank-calling Red Alert had likewise been stifled; and while he was rather proud of his restraint, Rodimus was starting to feel pretty damn stifled himself.

Why was there never an explosion when you needed one?

Rodimus’s comm chirped with an incoming conference call from Brainstorm and Perceptor.

… right, then. Explosions ahoy.

Rodimus tried to stifle any un-captain-ly excitement over the prospect of incendiary mayhem, decided that he had exceeded his stifling quota for the next week, and answered the call.

“Hey, it’s my favorite brain trust. S’up, nerds?”

“Hey, Rodders.” Brainstorm sounded mildly perturbed, which usually indicated that either something had failed to blow up when it should have, or something was going to blow up in a much more spectacular fashion than predicted. Also, it was probably going to be someone else’s explosion, which Brainstorm generally seemed to find disappointing. “We, ah … we’re getting some interesting readings from that nebula.”

Rodimus braced himself for disappointment on the explosion front. “What kind of interesting? Stuffy science-type interesting, or _interesting_ interesting?”

“Both, actually.” Perceptor, on the other hand, sounded almost chipper. Rodimus wasn’t entirely sure how to interpret that. “You see, the nebula contains a large number of Bok globules –“

“What globules?”

Brainstorm jumped in. “They’re dense molecular clouds – clumps of dust and gas that are often the site of star formation.”

“Okaaaay …” Rodimus was willing to give the geek squad the benefit of the doubt, for now, but his jargon threshold was already being tested.

“Yes, right, so it’s a particularly rich field of potential star formation,” Perceptor continued. “What’s significant is that we just picked up a massive gamma radiation spike, and we think the cloud may be on the verge of a triggered stellar ignition.”

“Does that … mean what I think it means?” Rodimus asked slowly, hoping to avoid provoking another outburst of science-speak.

“Well, that depends.” Rodimus would swear that there was a hint of a smirk in Brainstorm’s voice. “If you think it means that we’re almost on top of what is likely to be a really big explosion, then yes.”

Rodimus was just gearing up for a round of delighted fist-pumping when reality crashed back in on him in an icy deluge that froze every fluid in his frame. “… uh. Guys? This is the same nebula that Orion and Megatron are currently exploring, right?”

There was profound silence on the comm channel.

“We have to get them out of there.” All the enthusiasm had been stripped from Brainstorm’s voice.

“Is there a minimum safe distance or something?” Rodimus was up and pacing, any and all stifling completely thrown to the winds.

“Fifty to one hundred light-years, depending on the size of the protostar being formed.” Perceptor, too, was in ice-cold analytical mode.

Rodimus stopped dead. “We’re too close.”

“Yes.”

“We have to get out of here.”

A pause, and then – “yes. We do.”

Rodimus began opening channels to everyone he could think of, trying frantically to raise Orion and Megatron, trying to raise anyone on the ship who was space-flight capable. “How long do we have?”

“Once the core ignites, the shock wave will accelerate in a matter of seconds to as much as three percent of the speed of light.” Perceptor’s voice was accelerating at a similar rate as he began running multiple parallel simulations.

“Do we know exactly when the core is going to ignite?” Rodimus hissed out a series of vitriolic curses under his breath – neither Orion nor Megatron were answering their comms. In fact, as far as he could tell, neither of them was even receiving comms.

“Negative.”

Rodimus felt very cold, suddenly, and very young. “So what you’re telling me is that we have to get out of here right fragging now. With or without Orion and Megatron.”

There was an audible pause before Perceptor replied, slowly, “Yes, Captain. That is what we are telling you.”

*

_There was no darkness._

_There was no pain._

_There was no grief, or fear, or regret._

_There was no past._

_There was giddy turbulence, and a long spiraling dance ever inward, tighter and tighter until two sparks met and merged into a single point of light._

_There was a breath, and then …_

_There was fusion._

*

“Okay,” said Rodimus irritably, “what I don’t get – and yes, the list of things that I don’t get is actually very long right now – but anyway, what I don’t get is this: you said this event was triggered, yeah? Triggered by what?”

“Actually, that’s a very interesting question,” Perceptor replied, attention partially diverted by the copious amounts of SCIENCE going on at the moment. “Usually, an ignition trigger is something like a supernova, or a galactic collision, or a relatively weak RF jet from a supermassive black hole – a stronger jet would actually inhibit stellar formation, of course –“

“Of course,” Rodimus muttered sourly. Perceptor glanced at him and abruptly decided it was time to get back on track.

“But in this case, the stellar ignition appears to have been triggered by a massive energy pulse from inside the nebula itself. The source of the energy pulse is, at this time, unknown –“

Brainstorm muttered something sarcastic that included the words “Pit of a good overload.”

Rodimus groaned and clapped his hands over his ears. “Oh frag no, I did _not_ need to think about that! … what?” he added suspiciously in response to the sudden speculative look on Perceptor’s face.

“Well, it’s not actually impossible –“

“What?!” Rodimus and Brainstorm yelped in stereo. 

“Are you insane?” Brainstorm demanded. “You know there isn’t anywhere near enough energy released, even with a spark merge, to trigger this kind of event!”

“… not where I was going with that, seriously,” Rodimus moaned, horrified. Brainstorm and Perceptor ignored him, caught up in energy-output estimation and their favorite pastime, Arguing About Science.

“What if you take into account the nature of the merger’s sparks?” Perceptor mused. “A Matrix-bearer and a 0.1-percenter … would that make enough of a difference?”

“Unlikely,” Brainstorm mused back, “but it’s not like we have anything in the way of a decent data set to extrapolate from.”

Rodimus choked on a laugh. “Are you trying to tell me that in the entire history of our species, no one has ever fragged in a nebula before?”

Brainstorm’s mask was probably hiding a grin, given the crinkles forming at the corners of his eyes. “That seems statistically unlikely, I grant you … but if anyone has ever fragged in a nebula and kicked off a reaction, it’s not like they’d be able to tell us about it afterward ...”

The smile fell off his face as Brainstorm realized the implications of what he’d just said. No one else could think of a reply.

*

There was no small number of mecha aboard the _Lost Light_ who were perfectly willing to travel into the nebula in order to contact and rescue Orion Pax, formerly Optimus Prime; there were even a few – though admittedly a much smaller number – who were willing to do so in order to save Megatron; but even Cybertronians who possessed alt modes capable of extra-vehicular interstellar space travel – in other words, probably the most durable life forms in the cosmos – could not survive exposure to the sheer quantity of energy being emitted from the birth of a new star.

“We’re talking about radiation across the entire electro-magnetic spectrum,” Brainstorm tried to explain to Rodimus, who was frankly beyond his science-comprehension capacity and completely frantic as well. “It’s not just visible light, it’s everything. Visible light is only a tiny fraction of what’s going to be emitted by that star; the infrared emissions alone –“

“Infrared – like heat, right?” Rodimus broke in desperately. “I can take heat, you know I can, for frag’s sake –“

Perceptor reached over and took hold of Rodimus by both shoulders, shocking him into brief stillness. “Rodimus, no. No. Not this. You can’t take this. You can’t take more than 2500 Kelvin. No one can.”

Rodimus crumpled. “Percy … I have to do _something_.”

“Yes, you do.” Perceptor waited until he had Roddy’s full attention. “You have to be the captain.”

All the air shuddered out of Rodimus in one harsh rasp; but he straightened himself, and nodded, and set off for the bridge.

*

The _Lost Light_ tried to contact Orion and Megatron, trying all frequencies and all known methods of communication. They boosted their comms, tried every imaginable filter and then some, tried new and desperate things in the fruitless quest to transmit or receive through the raging maelstrom of electromagnetic interference.

They waited, for as long as they possibly could; they moved in closer than was safe or sane to try to contact the absent pair. They waited until waiting was no longer an option, until “waiting” became synonymous with “suicide,” until Rodimus – _not again_ , he thought bleakly, _not again, I don’t want to make this choice again_ – finally had to give the order to jump away to a safe distance.

Orion and Megatron were gone.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It might take a very long time, but everyone does get to live happily ever after.

From a safe distance, the crew of the _Lost Light_ bore witness to the creation of a new star as her captain logged two communications with their homeworld – one to report said astrophysical phenomenon, and the other to report the loss of two mechs to the vast cosmic indifference of the same astrophysical phenomenon.

Grief and regret can be paralytic. But there was a quest, and a goal, and a need to move on.

The Lost Light passed on into the annals of history, and her adventures are chronicled elsewhere; but all stories intersect eventually.

*

_There was no loneliness._

_There was no darkness._

_There was no pain._

_Wholly enmeshed along the axes of the myriad intersecting dimensions across which their sparks existed, Orion and Megatron slept, and did not dream._

*

Ten million years is a length of time incomprehensible to most organic life forms. To a Cybertronian, ten million years is not even a fully realized lifespan; to a star, it is barely the first gasp of life. Ten million years to transition from a clump of cold, dense gas to a protostar, angular momentum and gravity pulling it into an ever-denser sphere until finally the core ignites as thermonuclear fusion begins and the collapse is halted, a perfect and precarious balance between inescapable gravitational attraction and irresistible outward pressure.

An average-sized star, like that around which Unicron’s slumbering hulk orbited in its unsuspecting organic shroud, will mature to adulthood and take its place on the main sequence over the course of roughly fifty million years. The crew of the _Lost Light_ who witnessed the heaving inferno of the new star’s ignition would not be around to see it reach adulthood, its colossal fusion engine pouring energy into the cosmos as a clutch of little worlds formed from the detritus of its birth. The Lost Light’s crew would never set foot on its worlds, feel its heat, see its light as it crested the horizon in the first true dawn over a new planet.

There would be others, though, who did. There would be others who would come to call some of those new worlds ‘home.’

*

An average-sized star, like that which the long-ago crew of the _Lost Light_ saw created, can remain on the main sequence for approximately ten billion years.

Even for a species that can measure its average lifespan in geological epochs, ten billion years is a long time.

*

_There was no loneliness._

_There was no darkness._

_There was no pain._

_There was light, and heat, and fusion, and perfect balance._

_Amid the relentless seething chaos of solar fusion, there was peace._

*

Like all things, an average-sized star – even one that holds Unicron in gravitational thrall through his long hibernation – will eventually reach the end of its life. Eventually, the hydrogen in its core will reach exhaustion. The outer layers of the star will expand and cool (for a relative value of cool) and the star will be transformed into a red giant. Sufficient mass will permit further, more exotic fusion reactions to continue – helium to carbon, carbon to neon, neon to oxygen to silicon to iron to death – but gradually the core will become unstable, throwing off its outer layers in a vast fulminating cloud to reveal the stellar core itself.

The star in the human’s solar system was billions of years into its life cycle when the new star was formed, and as such reached the end of that life cycle while the new star was still in its prime. Its expansion and the threat of vaporization thus presented was sufficient to rouse Unicron from his stasis, and the Chaos Bringer shook off his organic shroud and unfolded himself into the known universe once again, reaching out for his distant counterpart.

At long last, his distant counterpart reached back.

In other circumstances, this could have had a significantly negative effect on the people living on Primus’s surface. Luckily, those people had had a few billion years to further evolve, and evolve they had.

One perspective on Cybertronians offers that they were not actually intelligent robotic lifeforms but were, in fact, a form of energy being that relied on cybernetic life support and mobility systems. A few billion years later, that reliance had been overcome by the combined powers of evolution and scientific advancement. A few billion years, and Cybertronians had stepped out among the stars as raw sparks – no shuttles, no alt modes, no frames, no armor – and Primus had smiled to see them go. He had sent his children out into the universe for the final time; and he turned at last to his counterpart in welcome.

Order and Chaos, Creation and Destruction – they regarded each other for a long time. To an observer, any communication between the two would have been imperceptible, assuming that any observer even existed who could actually perceive the interaction of a pair of pseudo-physical manifestations of abstract concepts who existed simultaneously across multiple dimensions. Assuming such an observer did exist, however, said observations would hopefully have been quickly curtailed in order to respect the privacy of said interdimensional abstract manifestations, who decided that – now that the kids were gone – it was a fine time to kiss and make up, and then consummate the resumption of good relations with a vigorous make-up shag before sloping off together to find the interdimensional abstract manifestation equivalent of a nice little retirement bungalow.

Even interdimensional pseudo-physical manifestations of Order and Entropy can have a happy ending.

*

_A strange, shuddering, ecstatic perturbation rippled through the fabric of space-time, churning the quantum foam and rocking the entwined spark-core in its deep slumber._

_Orion and Megatron shifted against each other, still deeply asleep, and settled back to rest._

*

There came at last a time when the new star’s life cycle ran down in its turn. Its outer shell was cast off and its core exposed as a white dwarf; its fusion engine worn down, its fuel exhausted, it eventually dwindled and, like a candle at the end of its wick, snuffed out.

Of course, that’s no more the end of its story than a burst of deuterium fusion was its beginning; and all stories – long or short, happy or sad, hard science or fairy tale – eventually intersect.

*

_There was peace, both within and without – the chaos of thermonuclear fusion had come to an end._

_There was darkness, but from within their union there was light._

_There was cold – the vast deep cold of interstellar space – but from within their union there was warmth._

_There was solitude, but now – far distant but nevertheless, in an endlessly entangled cosmos, within metaphorical arm’s reach – there was the choice of companionship, of connection to beloved sparks so long bereaved._

_The shards of identity that still bore the names of Orion Pax and Megatron conferred without speech, agreed without words, and reached out across the stars to find their people._

**Author's Note:**

> If you find yourself thinking, "But that doesn't work with any known continuity," you're right! This is a totally self-indulgent hodge-podge, and I apologize for everything.


End file.
